Friday, November 27, 2009

[I have a piece in Nature on an art exhibition in the US by Julian Voss-Andreae, who has been working for some time now on representations of ideas, concepts and objects in physics and chemistry. This latest show is called ‘Quantum Objects’, and there are images of it here. I have written previously about Julian’s chemistry-related sculptures. I think Julian’s work is some of the best there is on the sci-art interface, creating a genuine point of confluence rather than, as all too often happens, a kind of awkward shotgun marriage.

In the course of preparing the piece, I had an exchange with Julian about the thinking behind his work, during which he said far more than I could accommodate in the article. This was all good stuff, so I’ve appended his comments below.]

When once asked what his Third ('Eroica') Symphony meant, Beethoven is said to have sat down at the piano and started to play it. Physicists might seek analogous recourse when asked to explain quantum theory – by writing down Schrödinger’s wave equation. And even this was Schrödinger’s attempt to provide a concrete embodiment of the still more abstract ‘description’ in Heisenberg’s austere matrix mechanics. Some of the field’s pioneers concluded that perhaps all we can ever meaningfully hope for by way of representation are the equations.

This implies that any attempt to show quantum concepts using images, whether for experts or non-specialists, is doomed to be misleadingly reductive. But maybe another alternative is to subvert our preconceptions through art. That is the view of Oregon-based sculptor Julian Voss-Andreae. Art, he says, ‘freed nowadays from the presupposition that it needs to visually accurately represent reality, has a unique potential for indicating aspects of reality that science cannot.’

Voss-Andreae is better placed to judge than most artists, for he was previously a physicist working at the forefront of experimental quantum physics at the University of Vienna, where he came face to face with the counter-intuitive aspects of the theory. In 1999 he participated in a ground-breaking experiment showing that even objects as ‘big’ as C60 molecules may display the wavelike property of interference (M. Arndt et al., Nature401, 680-682; 1999). Voss-Andreae’s portrayals of ‘quantum objects’ are now on display in an exhibition called Worlds Within Worlds, running until April at the American Center for Physics in College Park, Maryland.

‘There simply are no consistent mental images we can create to understand the world as it is portrayed in quantum physics, because our brains are exquisitely adapted to making sense of the world on our scale’, says Voss-Andreae. ‘I want to increase the audience’s capacity to intuit the unfathomable deeper nature of reality by sensually experiencing the works.’

This attempt to leap beyond the logical is an impulse with an obvious appeal to artists, but Voss-Andreae is not the first to find inspiration in the way that modern physics requires it of us. In the early twentieth century, Surrealist artists such as André Breton and Salvador Dalí were excited by what they saw as the challenge posed by quantum theory and relativity to conventional notions of causality, time, geometry and objectivity (see Gavin Parkinson’s Surrealism, Art and Modern Science; Yale University Press, 2008). Yet their enthusiasm was due as much to the new physics’ perceived radicalism and assault on convention as it was to any genuine interest in the theories, and they didn’t understand the science terribly well.

But who does? Perhaps the biggest problem for any artist seeking to mine quantum theory is that some of the fundamental issues are still not agreed by its practitioners. The disputes about interpretation among the early pioneers such as Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg and Schrödinger are now legendary (see Manjit Kumar’s Quantum; Icon, 2008), but this by no means implies that they are behind us. The Copenhagen interpretation favoured by Bohr and Heisenberg, with its wave-particle duality, probabilistic picture and observer-induced collapse of the wavefunction is still not universally accepted, and the nature of the transition from quantum to classical behaviour continues to be debated. Meanwhile, the failure to unify quantum theory with gravitation remains one of the most well advertised lacunae in physics, seeming to leave open the possibility that quantum theory is a stop-gap, a mere mathematical convenience.

It’s therefore arguably either brave or foolhardy to try to represent quantum phenomena visually. Perhaps Voss-Andreae’s greatest asset as a former physicist is that he knows how much we don’t know, and how much is contingent. In some of his works, the inverted commas of analogy are explicit to the knowing eye. Quantum Corral materializes something that could hardly be less material: the wavelike properties of electrons (first reported in Nature in 1927). Here they are represented in a block of wood milled to the contours of electron density seen in 1993 around a ring of iron atoms on the surface of copper using a scanning tunnelling microscope. The gilded surface reminds physicists that it is the mobility of surface electrons in the metal which accounts for its reflectivity (and the coloration of gold is itself a relativistic effect of the metal’s massive nuclei). But for art historians, this gilding not only invokes the crown-like haloes of medieval altarpieces but could also allude to the way gold was reserved in the Renaissance for the intangible: the other-worldly light of heaven.

Night Path and Spin Family(Bosons and Fermions), with their webs of metal wire or silk thread in solid steel frames, hark back to the sculptures of Naum Gabo, themselves inspired by the appearance of new mathematical geometries and models. Yet Night Path shows a quantum idea: the path-integral approach to the trajectories of light, in which the passage of a photon is considered to be the integral over all possible paths, calculated by slicing up time. Here, however, Voss-Andreae is not trying to produce a ‘textbook’ representation. ‘I do not show a fixed end point as Feynman’s method demands’, he says. ‘Instead in my piece the paths emerge from one point and then keep opening up. The artwork is not meant to accurately illustrate the technique of path integration; I made it to illustrate the ‘feel’ of it.’ In the Spin Family series, inspired by the quantized spin states of the two classes of fundamental particles, the diaphanous thread allows us to visualize superpositions of states while cautioning against too literal a picture of what ‘spin’ itself represents.

A feeling of intangibility and the subjectivity of points of view pervades Quantum Man, a walking figure created from parallel slices of steel in which the particle-like concreteness seen from the front shifts to wave-like near-invisibility viewed from the side. This sense of an object on the point of disintegrating is a common trope of recent artistic efforts to capture ideas in physics, from Antony Gormley’s Quantum Cloud series to Cornelia Parker’s Cold Dark Matter. Put the pieces together yourself, they seem to say – because that’s how the world works anyway.

Q&A with Julian Voss-AndreaePB: Do you actually want to give viewers a flavour of the ideas behind the quantum works, or are you simply using the science as a launching point for something more abstract?

J V-A: I do want to give a flavor of the underlying ideas, at least while the sculptures are on display at the American Center for Physics. I am displaying them with explanatory text to alert the audience to the fact that there is a real concept behind each piece. For this show I wanted to make works that physicists can relate to. But I didn’t want to stop there. I am always seeing the physics (or other sciences) as a starting point for creating something that develops its own life as an art object. I want people who don’t have a background in science to enjoy the work as well. I want to increase the audience’s capacity to intuit the unfathomable deeper nature of reality by sensually experiencing the works.PB: Do you feel that quantum theory is really something that can be, or ought to be, visualized at all? - I guess the answer to that must clearly be 'yes'

J V-A: Well, the way my own mind functions I cannot really grasp anything without images. I have to make images for myself, real ones or in my mind, if they don’t exist. And I believe that this is so for many if not most people. So if you look at any quantum mechanics textbook there are lots of images - especially in books from your culture. In Germany people have often tried to get rid of images [even though they have the word ‘anschaulich’]; there was for example a movement in mathematics, I believe in the 1960s, which banned images altogether from their books because the authors felt it is a flawed practice since every image can always portray only one special case. That is of course true, but most of us still need images. Many of the more complicated things visualized in quantum physics textbooks are clearly illustrations of a single facet of something more complex and more abstract, something that the mathematical description might be able to express in one coherent concept but that we sometimes cannot grasp within one coherent (mental) picture. You are probably familiar with Bernd Thaller’s work: He creates movies of quantum systems, typically of the time evolution of wave functions. Using color value and hue to encode different variables he is able to portray complete wave functions including their phase. It looks beautiful how they move and it is very instructive. So, I definitely think quantum theory can and should be visualized.PB: But what would you say to the view that any such representation is bound to create an artificially concrete representation of something that is beyond our capacity to intuit?

It has been recognized that quantum theory does not admit of a realistic interpretation. For example, we have no accurate space-time representation of a particle, say an electron: it is neither a wave nor a particle nor any other “thing”. So there is certainly a danger in presenting artificially concrete representations without making sure they are correctly understood as only a facet of something more complex or altogether different. A well-known example of such a misunderstanding is the ubiquitous hydrogen atom model. There are the earlier models that show electrons as particles orbiting the nucleus in discrete orbits. Then there are the representations of electrons as wave-functions: countless textbooks show the images of s, p, d,… orbitals. [These models often contain an additional imprecision in that they illustrate only the angular dependence of the wave function, and not also the radial one. I am sure there are quite a few scientists who would draw those spherical harmonics if asked ‘what a hydrogen atom looks like’.] But even if the observable electron density is pictured, there still remains a problem, namely the very notion that a hydrogen atom (or any quantum “object”, for that matter), is an object, and has a particular appearance independent of the means used to observe it, or for that matter any objective existence at all. So in the case of the H atom, even if the correct three dimensional shape of the probability density is pictured it is still a potentially misleading abstraction because you need to keep in mind that this shape merely represents tendencies for results of possible electron position measurements, whereas the phenomenal reality it refers to are the discrete and apparently random positions at which the electron is actually measured when an experiment is carried out in which that wave-form represents the prepared state. In fact, there is always a danger of taking any image or model too literally (Whitehead’s “fallacy of misplaced concreteness”). Using images in science or philosophy to illustrate states of affair is therefore quite generally a two-edged sword, and one needs to know the limits of a picture, and use it with discrimination and intelligence. So with that caution, I would say that art, freed as it is nowadays from the presupposition that it needs to visually accurately represent reality, has a rather unique potential for indicating aspects of reality that science cannot.

In a related vein, I don’t think that a specific piece of art has a single correct “interpretation” (as is true for a textbook image). To me, good art is something that has (by virtue of its sensual and conceptual properties) the potential to give rise to a web of meaningfully interlocking interpretations. So my experimentation ultimately aims at finding (in that sense) ‘good’ art objects. [Btw, it is interesting to relate this to the quantum mechanical measurement process: Art is like an unmeasured wave function with tendencies, a superposition of possibilities (the different interpretations). Then comes the individual’s interpretation of the art work in a specific instance, analogous to the physical measurement that reduces it to one classical answer and forces the system into that state.]

To further comment on the relationship between my art and the science it relates to: a piece like “Night Path” (the Feynman paths one) if shown in a textbook, might lead to the misunderstanding that there are a finite number of actual paths to be added. Of course, the number really needs to be infinite to yield the correct result. Moreover, I do not show a fixed end point as Feynman’s method demands; but instead in my piece the paths emerge from one point and then keep opening up. But the art work here is not meant to accurately illustrate the technique of path integration. I made it to illustrate the ‘feel’ of it. I like the idea of having these myriad paths that wiggle around in a completely ‘non-physical’ fashion (i.e. being everywhere at every time) and that they get more and more important in the classical trajectory’s vicinity because there the phase oscillates slower. So I took a Gaussian distribution around a parabola and used the pseudo random generator in the computer to calculate where to make holes into the slices. I followed the output of the algorithm quite strictly because I didn’t want to bias the result with ‘human pseudo randomness’. Before I built the piece I visualized it in the computer to fine-tune the parameters involved (the shape of the trajectory, the sigma of the Gaussian etc.) and that gave me the idea of evoking an image of a meteor falling through the night, which then informed the choice of colors. That is where I allow myself the ‘poetic departure’ from physics. For a textbook, I would not have used a parabola and I would have collected the paths back into a single endpoint. So my hope is to convey this bizarre feeling of the path integral approach (even if it is not recognized as such) by merging it with an image (the meteor) that is known to everyone. I always feel I am experimenting here. Not only with the materials and algorithms etc. but also with having an idea and turning it into a real object to see what it does to me and others. This is where my experimental art work departs from experimental physics: I am ultimately interested in creating an art object, something that strikes a chord in the viewer.

[I think it is key to display the works in an art setting. Even though it is the American Center for Physics in this case, the place where the sculptures are displayed is designated to displaying art and the audience knows that. The same is true for the display on my website.]

[Concerning the wording in your question: Do you mean capacity to intuit or capacity to understand? There are obviously things that are beyond our capacity to understand in the sense that we cannot find a single coherent mental image that provides a complete description of that thing. But maybe we can intuit a solution to a paradox even though we cannot understand it.][PB: I agree, and that’s indeed what I meant: intuition does not necessary imply rigorous understanding, but is perhaps all we can hope for here, especially if one isn’t a specialist.]PB: I'm also interested in whether there are any artists who provide particular inspiration for you, either from a purely visual point of view or because they have similarly tried to articulate and present rather abstract ideas and phenomena.
J V-A: I am influenced visually by a lot of things in art and architecture. I frequently get ideas from other artists about how to solve problems technically or they give me an idea what could work visually. I don’t have a particular artist that I draw inspiration from when it comes to taking images from science to create art. But on a more abstract level there are artists I greatly admire for the intensity of their work and because they lead the way with their visions and their ability to realize them. There is one artist in particular I feel I have an odd connection with and that is Antony Gormley. It happened several times already that I had an idea and found out later that he had gone in that direction. We are interested in very similar things and he is very systematic and efficient in exploring them. I would love to meet him one day.
PB: Can you also tell me a little about how the exhibition came about?

J V-A: The curator, Sarah Tanguy, had asked me a few years ago if I was interested in showing my work at the American Center for Physics because she thought my work would fit well there. Last year, after she was able to secure the funding, I was supposed to have the show. But after I had thought about it and decided to make all works which had to do with quantum physics, I realized that I needed another year to finish them.

Statement on the website, also displayed at the exhibition (J V-A)
The term “Quantum Object”, although regularly used in physics, is really an oxymoron. An ‘object’ is something that lives completely in the paradigm of classical physics: It has an independent reality in itself, it behaves deterministically, and it has definite physical properties, such as occupying a well-defined spot in time and space. For the ‘quantum’ all those seemingly self-evident truths become false: Its reality is one that is relative to the observer, the principle of causality is violated, and other features of materiality such as clear boundaries in space and time, objective locatedness or even identity, do not pertain.
After struggling with quantum physics for the last hundred years we cannot escape the fact that there simply are no consistent mental images we can create to understand the world as it is portrayed in quantum physics, because our brains are exquisitely adapted to making sense of the world on our scale, as perceived through our unaided senses. My hope is that the unique ability of art to transcend the confines of logic and literal representation and to offer glimpses of something beyond can help us open up to a deeper understanding of the world and to wean ourselves from the powerful grip classical physics has had over the last centuries on our every perception of reality.General Artist Statement (J V-A)

My diverse interests, investigations and works as both scientist and artist are ultimately derived from my lifelong fascination with Nature. As an observational painter in my youth I was so intrigued by the natural sciences and its philosophical implications, that I subsequently spent the next eight years studying physics at European universities. I earned my degree in physics participating in a seminal experiment at the boundary between quantum physics and philosophy. I then moved to the United States to study art and began developing a body of sculptural work often inspired by scientific themes, such as quantum physics or the structure of protein molecules, the building blocks of life.

I create art by taking something I see or know and translating it into an object. This translation starts out being guided by clearly expressible ideas and tends to develop into something successively complex and less accessible through logic and words. The act of creation contains an extraordinary and most fulfilling aspect I find impossible to understand intellectually: The creative moments are not governed by my conscious thought. On the contrary, it is typically the unconsciously contributed aspects, executed in a certain meditative state of mind that brings the work to life, adding new and often surprising layers of meaning.

It is important for me to create works in a spectrum ranging from mostly intellectual to mostly intuitive in order to generate a cross-inspiration between both approaches. Achieving the right balance of intellect and intuition, of science and art, is central to both my work and my life. In fact, I feel unable to clearly distinguish between the concepts of intellect and intuition, which are commonly perceived as polar opposites, and I strive to unify these opposites into a single more fundamental idea. I am motivated by the desire to create a broader understanding of Nature than the one provided by science alone: My work allows intuiting our world by offering a sensual experience of what is usually accessible only through our intellect.

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Blackwell’s have, in their wisdom, apparently selected Critical Mass as one of their top 100 ‘paperbacks of the decade’ (don’t ask me why they specify paperbacks). Nice. As a result, they asked me to come up with my own selection of three from the past decade – which is not as easy as it sounds (it makes me realise that most of the books I read are older than this). So this is what I offered them:

James Meek’s The People’s Act of Love (Canongate, 2005), while beautifully written and plotted, might not seem an obvious candidate for an outstanding novel of the decade. But it has stayed with me as an exquisite piece of storytelling of the kind that one associates with the best pre-modernist fiction, and makes a compelling imaginative leap into a wholly unfamiliar milieu. Comparisons with Conrad and Dostoevsky were not amiss. It’s not clear whether W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz (Penguin, 2002) is fiction or not, but it was my introduction to Sebald and to an entirely original and totally hypnotic style of writing. Richard Holmes’ The Age of Wonder (HarperCollins, 2008) is perhaps the only history of science I have read that has been genuinely exciting and inspiring to read, with something to enthral the reader on every page. All of these books have left their mark on my own writing.

Sunday, November 15, 2009

I have a review of Christopher Booker’s book The Real Global Warming Disaster in the Observer today. Here it is below in its original form. I’d be surprised if Booker, or other sceptics, don’t respond in some way, so here too is some of the further comment at which I hinted in the review. And not that it is likely in any way to prevent Booker from dismissing me as a minion of the great conspiracy that is the ‘global warming consensus’, but I’ll just mention too that I have also taken some flak in the past from James Hansen, Booker’s prime villain as the man who (he says, absurdly) almost single-handedly got the global-warming juggernaut on the road. I didn’t endorse Hansen’s call for a more forcefully worded message from the scientific community to supplement what he considered to be the reticence of the IPCC. My view was that, while I understand and sympathize with Hansen’s motivation, the IPCC’s caution has been to its great credit, and has helped maintain its credibility. Needless to say, to Booker the IPCC is simply a cabal of alarmists.

Christopher Booker, Sunday Telegraph columnist and bête noir of climate campaigners, has here produced the definitive climate sceptics’ manual. That’s to say, he has rounded up just about every criticism ever made of the majority scientific view that global warming, most probably caused by human activity, is underway, and presented them unchallenged. If you share his convictions, you’ll love it (although I’m not sure you’ll actually wade through the dense arguments), and will dismiss the rest of this review as part of the cover-up.

Me, I was moved to a queer kind of admiration for the skill and energy with which Booker has assembled his polemic. Unlike other climate-sceptic diatribes like the Channel 4 documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle or the writings of Nigel Lawson, this one cannot be dismissed with off-the-shelf knowledge. And some of it is true. But much, including the central claim, is bunk.

Some of Booker’s stratagems are transparent enough. One is to introduce all climate sceptics with a little eulogy to their credentials, while their opponents receive only a perfunctory, if not disparaging, preamble. This reaches its apotheosis on the back cover with a quote from ‘the world’s leading atmospheric physicist and ‘climate scientist’’, MIT professor Richard Lindzen. Unusually for sceptics, Lindzen does have significant academic status, but probably only his mother would endorse this description. Besides, it seems odd that someone so intent on raising platforms of authority should also ask us to believe that the credibility of the entire Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been undermined by an Australian computer consultant.

Another of Booker’s techniques is to latch on to genuine flaws in the science or its dissemination with the tenacity of a bulldog. Predictably, he attacks the infamous ‘hockey stick’ graph, a plot of global mean temperatures over the past 1000 years produced by two scientists in 1998 which shows little change for the entire period until suddenly soaring in the twentieth century. It is now mostly accepted that the analysis that produced these data was wrong. The question, still unresolved, is ‘how wrong?’ – have we experienced comparable warming in the historical past, in which case the argument that it is a natural fluctuation seems plausible, or is the current trend truly unusual? But Booker’s implication that the entire edifice of the global-warming consensus rested on the shaky hockey stick is absurd: it was one strand among many. For a balanced critique of this episode, look instead to Richard Muller’s Physics for Future Presidents (Norton).

In the end, however, the devil is in the details. And therein lies the problem, for to persuasively dismantle Booker’s case would require an equally long and citation-encrusted tome. You are going to get nothing more (here at least) than my word for it that, say, the first of Booker’s accusations about faulty science and procedural misdemeanour that I chose at random to investigate further – the resignation of hurricane specialist Chris Landsea from the IPCC in 2004 – proved to have a rather different complexion from the one presented here.

Yet some of the cracks become evident just from paying attention. When Booker commits the cardinal sin, for which climate scientists have often castigated alarmists, of making a swallow into a summer (or here, winter) by using the cold snap of 2008 as a reason to doubt the warming trend, it’s game over. And by claiming that the slight cooling trend since around 2003 undermines the IPCC’s climate models, he fails to understand that different timescales demand different models: the projections for 2100 are hardly meant to predict whether next summer will be a scorcher. Don’t even get me started about the graph on page 328 that shows this cooling; just take a look at http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.A2.lrg.gif and then tell me what you feel about it (what do you mean, where is it? It’s that bit at the end). Besides, Booker admits briefly that a climate model in which medium-term ocean circulation was included was able in 2009 to rationalize the current cooling (which may last until 2015). We are supposed to regard this result as suspiciously convenient, but even Booker can come up with no scientific reasons to discard it. Indeed, he later criticizes the IPCC models for failing to simulate shifts in ocean currents. His aim is simply to sling enough mud, and to hell with consistency.

Suppose you are genuinely undecided on climate change, and determined not to be guided simply by what you’d like to believe. If unpicking the real story demands so much effort and insider knowledge, how can you possibly make up your mind? Here’s an unscientific suggestion. Booker’s position would require that you accept something like the following options: (1) Most of the world’s climate scientists, for reasons unspecified, decided to create a myth about human-induced global warming, and have managed to twist endless measurements and computer models to fit their case, without the rest of the scientific community noticing. George W. Bush and certain oil companies have, however, seen through the deception. (2) Most of the world’s climate scientists are incompetent and have grossly misinterpreted their data and models – yet their faulty conclusions are not, as you might imagine, a random chaos of assertions, but all point in the same direction.

There’s a third option, however: (3) The world’s climate system is hugely complex, hard to predict, and constantly surprising; yet in the long term the world is getting warmer, for reasons we basically understand, and there is good reason to believe that humans are mostly responsible for it.

You decide.

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Oh, there is much, much more to be said. As I say in the review, taking on Booker’s arguments means wading through a morass of technical detail and having to get hold of the scientists involved to get the real story. I have done so in just a few cases. If they are representative, then it seems clear what to expect of the rest. Here we go:

Boy, does Booker have it in for David King, former chief governmental science adviser. Quite aside from the specifics, his position here is utterly inconsistent – for example, he says at one point that it’s terrible we set so much store by someone’s credentials as a ‘qualified scientist’ (and thus dismiss Bjorn Lomborg), but it’s apparently equally terrible that we listen to King, a mere ‘surface chemist’. (Bizarrely, ‘surface chemistry’ never appears without its quotes, as though it’s some kind of made-up discipline.) King, says Booker, has little more specialist authority than ‘a man holding forth in a pub’ – or dare we say, in a newspaper column?

The main accusations against King, however, appear in Booker’s account of King’s trip to Moscow in 2004. This was indeed an extraordinary affair, but in the manner Booker asserts. The meeting, instigated by Putin, was supposed to bring together international experts to debate climate change. But as Booker indicates, some of the key Russians were sceptics, and as a result they derailed the whole affair. King was asked to arrange a programme, which he did, including 12 leading British scientists. However, then Putin brought in his economic adviser and head sceptic Alexander Illarionov, who hijacked the meeting and altered the programme, excluding the UK team and inviting several of the key sceptics, such as Nils-Axel Mörner at Stockholm. King and his team were actually en route to Moscow when they were given the revised programme, which immediately shows you the tactics Illarionov was using.

Naturally, King was furious. But he continued to the meeting when it was agreed that the British scientists would be allowed to speak. However, Illarionov insisted on chairing the entire meeting, and King’s team was persistently harangued throughout. The matter was so bad that King had to contact Tony Blair while in Moscow to explain that an international incident was developing; Jack Straw’s chance presence in Moscow at that time helped to prevent it from deteriorating any more than it did, but King was asked simply to try to make the best of it.

Booker alleges that King and his colleagues walked out when challenged with questions they couldn’t answer. In fact, King had announced already that he’d have to leave for another meeting at a certain point, and that’s what he did. As he did so, Illarionov was literally screaming at him that he was not permitted to go. One has the sense that, in former times in the Soviet Union, comrades who disagreed with Illarionov would have lost their jobs and silently disappeared, in the manner of Lysenkoism.

The extensive quotes that Booker provides from Illarionov’s three-hour subsequent press conference pretty much undermine his case in themselves, since they show him to be a borderline hysteric. Indeed, he claimed that Britain had ‘declared war’ on Russia, a claim that was repeated in a headline in the Moscow Times. What Booker doesn’t say is that Putin subsequently sacked Illarionov, who is now a bitter man. The whole episode, far from showing King to be intolerant and scientifically naïve, instead shows how crazy the climate sceptics can become, and how underhand their tactics are.

Next.

I mention the resignation of Chris Landsea in my review. The villain here is Kevin Trenberth, the hurricane modelling expert at UCAR (the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research in the US). Naturally, we hear nothing from Booker about Trenberth’s side of the story. So here is what Trenberth says of the matter:

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Summary:

Chris Landsea was not a Coordinating Lead Author (CLA) or a Lead author of the report. He was asked by the CLAs to be a contributing author (there are 66 in Chapter 3) who write a half page or so on a particular topics that are assembled into the report by the Lead Authors. He could easily refuse to do so, but to publicly resign the way he did was a very political approach that had nothing to do with any scientific dispute.
Trenberth’s response was to publish the scientific basis for the news conference criticized by Landsea in the June 2005 Science, and Kerry Emanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology independently published direct observational evidence in Nature only two months later. He showed that significant increases in cyclone intensity and duration around the world since 1970 have been strongly related to rising SSTs. Challenges from Landsea and other experts have led to modest revisions in the specific correlations, Emanuel 2005b, but do not alter the overall conclusion. In September 2005 Peter Webster and his colleagues at the Georgia Institute of Technology published an article in Science that explicitly showed a substantial rise in the number of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes since 1970 and in the percent of total hurricanes that fit that description. They concluded that the rise was to be expected, given the observed increase in SSTs.

Landsea’s letter was written late in 2004, and subsequently, in addition to the many new published papers, the record breaking 2005 hurricane season occurred, including hurricane Katrina and 3 other category 5 hurricanes.

There is no doubt that there is large natural variability in hurricanes, and also disputes about how reliable the record is, points made by Landsea (for example Landsea, Nature 2005 and Chan, Science 2006) ; but other articles have demonstrated that the changes in the hurricane environment have a human component, such as Santer et al., PNAS 2006.

There is a wide range of scientific opinion on the issue, reflecting the genuine scientific uncertainties and developing nature of the science. Subsequently, the IPCC has also weighed in and the attribution of changes to a human role are clearly stated in chapters that were not authored by Trenberth.
Trenberth summarizes his views on hurricanes as follows:

1) There is large natural variability of hurricanes. We can not say anything about increases in numbers or frequency from the record or how these may change in the future.

2) However, the environment in which the hurricanes are occurring is clearly changing, and those changes are part of global warming.

3) For the past 10 years the SSTs have been higher from 10-20∞N in the Atlantic, where the hurricanes form and track, than at any other time in the record through the 20th C.

4) During this period 8 out of the 10 years had above normal numbers of hurricanes and the 2 exceptions were El Niño years when the main activity shifts to the Pacific.

1995-2004 1970-1994 2004
TCs 13.6 8.6 14
Hurr 7.8 5.0 9

1) Water vapor amounts are rising
2) Precipitation has been becoming more intense in the US as a result.
3) Hurricane Catarina off Brazil in March 2004 was unprecedented

5) Hence there is every reason to think that these changes should increase the intensity of hurricanes and rainfalls associated with hurricanes.

6) We can not say anything much about the 4 hurricanes that hit Florida, except that the rainfalls and flooding were likely enhanced by global warming.

7) The IPCC in 2001 also states that hurricanes are likely to become more intense with stronger winds and heavier rainfalls.

8) While the influence of climate change on hurricanes may not be detectable because of large natural variability, this does not mean that there is no influence.

Landsea writes “It is beyond me why my colleagues would utilize the media to push an unsupported agenda that recent hurricane activity has been due to global warming.” Yet no such claims were made. On the contrary, it was clearly stated that natural variability was dominant in observed the climate record. Many other mis-statements have been made by Landsea about what was said, and the fact that all statements were carefully caveated.

There are always differences of opinion among scientists on issues of science. NCAR encourages responsible dialog and discussion. But we do not condone name-calling and deliberate attempts to mislead. The IPCC process is robust, open, and subject to extensive reviews, checks and balances. We have confidence that it will be balanced and represent the consensus. However, the process is helped if people contribute rather than withdraw from it.

Updates:
There was a tremendous amount of publicity, often ill-informed, following all of this. Trenberth remained quiet and did not respond in person to the often personal attacks on his integrity. Instead he documented the state of the science and the views he espoused at the press conference in this article:

The following was a rebuttal by the news conference participants:
Pielke et al (2005) provide their assessment of the situation with regard to hurricanes and global warming. They state there is "lack of a theory for future changes in storm frequencies" and "the state of understanding of tropical cyclogenesis provides too poor a foundation to base any projections about the future". Given the lack of any physical understanding of how hurricanes work it follows then that " ...until a relationship between actual storm intensity and tropical climate change is clearly demonstrated, it would be premature to conclude that such a link exists or is significant ..." . It is unfortunate that they overlook the considerable understanding and modeling capabilities that do exist in tropical storms, even while recognizing that the theory is incomplete. Indeed, there is plenty of research indicating that hurricanes do respond to the environment in which they are embedded, as summarized by Trenberth (2005).

Observed changes in hurricanes are masked by poor data, especially prior to the 1960s when the satellite era began. Moreover changes in atmospheric temperature throughout the atmosphere are distorted by changes in radiosondes and instruments. Rising sea surface temperatures and increased atmospheric water vapor provide the primary fuel for tropical convection through latent heat release, and both are increasing. Atmospheric dynamics play a key role in determining where storms occur and their tracks, and changes are less certain in association with global warming. But the evidence suggests increases in intensity of storms, once they are formed, and increases in heavy rains and risk of flooding. The Pielke et al. essay never does discuss the most widespread impact of such storms which is already flooding.

However, the essay also attacks the “misguided” participants in a telecon news conference held to discuss the changes and impacts of the record breaking 2004 hurricane season in Florida. The transcript of the news conference has been made available by UCAR (to correct the many misquotes of the statements made at that news conference. In fact the comments by Trenberth are fully consistent with those in Trenberth (2005). Pielke et al. further misquote the IPCC (2001). There is no doubt that social changes of people placing themselves in harm’s way contributes substantially to hurricane damage, but they seriously underestimate the changes in nature that also contribute. But then what should one expect from a bunch of guys who have no expertise in climate change? The article is exceedingly political, and can not even get the strong link between burning fossil fuels and energy and changes in carbon dioxide and atmospheric composition changes right.

Of course the 2005 season broke so many records that it further demonstrated that global warming was playing a role.

In January 2007, the AR4 IPCC report was approved in Paris with the following statement in the Policy Maker’s summary (approved unanimously):

There is observational evidence for an increase in intense tropical cyclone activity in the North Atlantic since about 1970, correlated with increases of tropical sea surface temperatures. There are also suggestions of increased intense tropical cyclone activity in some other regions where concerns over data quality are greater. Multi-decadal variability and the quality of the tropical cyclone records prior to routine satellite observations in about 1970 complicate the detection of long-term trends in tropical cyclone activity. There is no clear trend in the annual numbers of tropical cyclones.

And from the Summary of chapter 3 of IPCC:

Intense tropical cyclone activity has increased since about 1970. Variations in tropical cyclones, hurricanes and typhoons are dominated by ENSO and decadal variability, which result in a redistribution of tropical storm numbers and their tracks, so that increases in one basin are often compensated by decreases over other oceans. Trends are apparent in SSTs and other critical variables that influence tropical thunderstorm and tropical storm development. Globally, estimates of the potential destructiveness of hurricanes show a significant upward trend since the mid-1970s, with a trend towards longer lifetimes and greater storm intensity, and such trends are strongly correlated with tropical SST. These relationships have been reinforced by findings of a large increase in numbers and proportion of hurricanes reaching categories 4 and 5 globally since 1970 even as total number of cyclones and cyclone days decreased slightly in most basins. The largest increase was in the North Pacific, Indian and southwest Pacific Oceans. However, numbers of hurricanes in the North Atlantic have also been above normal (based on 1981–2000 averages) in 9 of the last 11 years, culminating in the record-breaking 2005 season. Moreover, the first recorded tropical cyclone in the South Atlantic occurred in March 2004 off the coast of Brazil.

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Well, that may be more than you wanted. But it suggests, at the very least, that this is a complicated matter, no? Would you conclude on the basis of all this, that there was skulduggery against Landsea, who was making valid criticisms of bad science? Oh, of course you might, if that’s the conclusion you want to reach. But I think you’d be hard put (to say the least) to make that case objectively.

Next.

Booker makes a big deal of how glacier retreat on Kilimanjaro has been cited as evidence of global warming. Now, the reasons for the retreat of the ‘snows of Kilimanjaro’ are complex and controversial, and it is ill-advised to use this as evidence of global warming. In this respect, Booker is right to criticize those who do so. But he is wrong and disingenuous to imply that this matter is settled. It’s true that one can pick from the literature to support the contention that the glacier retreat has nothing to do with global warming (and with a handful of incompletely cited works, Booker does just that). But an honest appraisal would force one to conclude that we just don’t know. For example, Lonnie Thompson has just published a paper (PNAS 10.1073/pnas.0906029106 - here) pointing out that, contrary to what Booker claims, the ice retreat on Kilimanjaro had not ‘mostly taken place before 1950’ – on the contrary, the areal extent of summit ice has been decreasing between 1989 and 2007 at more than twice the rate of the decline between 1912 and 1953. Thompson and colleagues present evidence that “the combination of processes driving the current shrinking and thinning of Kilimanjaro’s ice fields is unique within an 11,700-year perspective” (i.e. since the end of the last ice age).

“In their desperation to keep the panic going before next month's Copenhagen climate conference, the media warmist groupies last week wheeled out, yet again, one of their favourite but long-discredited scare stories, the one about the melting snows of Kilimanjaro. Their excuse was a new study by Al Gore's friend Dr Lonnie Thompson, claiming to show that the ice on Africa's highest mountain is vanishing due to soaring temperatures.

Indeed Kilimanjaro's snow and ice is receding, as I saw for myself when I climbed it a few years back. But, as a small army of international experts have shown, this has nothing to do with global warming (temperatures on the summit, at 19,346ft, never rise above freezing). It has been going on since 1880, due to the decline in precipitation caused by widespread clearance of forests around the volcano's base.

The rate of the ice shrinkage (as I note in my new book on the climate change scare, The Real Global Warming Disaster) was in fact at its greatest in the years before 1950, long before those rising 20th-century temperatures set off the panic over global warming.”

So he dismisses Thompson’s findings without having the slightest argument for why they are wrong – he simply repeats his assertion that the rate of ice loss was greatest before 1950. This puts me in mind of the debate with a creationist that Richard Dawkins records in his new book The Greatest Show on Earth, in which his arguments about the existence of plenty of transitional fossils in museums around the world is met with a mantra-like repetition of dogma.

Indeed, the main reason we are supposed to dismiss Thompson’s findings is that he is ‘Al Gore’s friend’ – I’m not sure I’ve ever seen Booker refer to him as anything else, whereas in reality Thompson is internationally regarded as one of the world’s foremost palaeoglaciolgists. And Booker doesn’t acknowledge that Thompson resolutely avoids firmly ascribing the retreat of Kilimanjaro’s ice to anthropogenic global warming. The paper says that it is difficult to identify the reason for the continued retreat, and acknowledges that precipitation changes have been implicated (Thompson offers reasons why they are unlikely to be sufficient on their own to account for the trend, however). Thompson also points out that the observed trends are consistent with what has been observed on mountain glaciers elsewhere which are not complicated by such factors. In other words, Thompson lays out his arguments clearly, and stops short of making unjustified extrapolations or interpretations. This is how science is done. Booker just clings to his old story as if to a pole in the wind.

Booker says in his concluding ‘personal note’ that “It is inevitable that such a book will contain errors for which I am solely to blame. But I look forward to the zeal with which they will be picked out and fastened on by hostile reviewers and commentators, claiming that, if I have got this or that fact wrong, then this proves that the whole book can be dismissed as worthless.” Well no, Christopher, I won’t do that – that is your technique, not mine. However, one has occasionally to raise eyebrows. For example, he claims that “global temperatures in 2007 began that sharp drop which for the first time revealed a distinct gap between the predictions of the computer models that they would continue to rise by 0.3 C per decade, and what was happening in the real world.” And we are now [in the writing of the book] in… mid-2009? So already we know where we’ll end up in 2017? Extraordinary. And then on page 233, Booker claims that “global temperatures’ had experienced a ‘total drop since January 2007” of 7.7 degrees – “a tenth of a degree more than the entire net warming of the 20th century.” Can he be serious? I think he means 0.7 degrees. Bit unfortunate, the way this error seems so alarmingly to support his case. (Actually it wouldn’t, to anyone knowledgeable, who’d recognize that a cooling of this magnitude in so short a time would be unlike anything we’ve ever seen in any climate record ever, and so would have to indicate a process of Armageddon-like proportions.)

Finally, I have just seen Geoffrey Normington’s post on the Prospect site about taking on the climate sceptics. I can’t say I wasn’t warned.

Saturday, November 14, 2009

There’s an interesting article in Science (326, 784-787) about what one might call the natural history of religion, reviewing current thought on how it might have arisen for evolutionary and cognitive reasons. Now, this is of course potentially dodgy territory, because it is a trivial matter to construct nice evolutionary-psychological Just So stories for why a propensity for religious belief might have had survival benefits. But Elizabeth Culotta’s article shows that the basic question is a serious one, and is being given some well-considered attention.

And this set me thinking what my friends the New Atheists make of it all. For the peculiar fact is that it seems more or less essential to their position, dare one say even an article of faith, that religion is not a product of evolution at all. They seem determined to believe (contra Darwin himself) that religion, perhaps almost uniquely among major behavioural traits of human populations, has no genetic component.

That would seem to be the view, for example, of P. Z. Myers. Apropos of my exchange with Sam Harris on science and religion, he said ‘It's a weird thing to argue with an atheist who claims religion is unavoidable (Oh? So what's so special about you?)’ – which, when you think about it, has the same absurd logic as the suggestion (I trust believers to humour this metaphor) that the existence of people without criminal records means that criminality is obviously avoidable in society. And besides, as I have mentioned before, this was a particularly lazy reading of my comments, since I pointed out only that we have notably failed to ‘avoid’ religion throughout history so far (I don’t think we need to debate that, do we?). I have no idea if it is ‘avoidable’ in any abstract sense, or even what that might mean.

Yet the odd thing is that I somewhat share Myers’ scepticism. To conclude from the near-ubiquity of religion in human culture that it must therefore be a genetic endowment seems rather akin to concluding that, say, schools or financial systems must be the products of our genes. Yet of course the argument is not quite as simple as that. For example, David Comings in California has found that the gene encoding DRD4, a protein that modulates the neurotransmission of dopamine, is present in a more active form in people who show a greater propensity to believe in miracles, mysticism and a spiritual supreme force, and less active in people with rationalist tendencies. I’m not about to answer Myers’ question ‘what’s so special about me?’ by saying that I must have a less active variety of DRD4; but neither am I (nor he) in any position to deny that such factors might play a role. Nonetheless, religiosity is hardly distributed throughout society in the patchy, pseudo-random manner of many genetically based diseases, and I’m inclined to attribute much more to culture than to genes. Certainly, it doesn’t seem likely to be very profitable to search in our genes for reasons why one might believe that (say) the Earth is 10,000 years old.

But genes and culture are not so easily disentangled if a genetic tendency towards religion were very widespread. Some believe that it is. Lee Silver points out in his 2006 book Challenging Nature that ‘in no country of the world ever surveyed do reported levels of spirituality dip below 60 percent’ and that ‘all the evolutionary, genetic, and cultural studies and analyses… make it clear that our own biology, rather than divine spirits or society at large, is the primary source of human spirituality.’ (Perhaps I missed it, but I don’t believe Myers has taken the heavyweight Silver to task over this.) He adds that that ‘this conclusion is anathema to both dogmatic theists and postmodern atheists’ – for, if religion is an innate tendency rather than a foolish belief system foisted upon us by indoctrination, can we really hope to persuade the general population to discard it, whatever one-off conversions Sam Harris and his friends might celebrate? And yet – this is the truly bizarre thing – Sam utterly refused to engage with the milder and perhaps more ‘optimistic’ possibility (from that perspective) that I suggested, which is that religion might instead be one of those cultural phenomena, like monarchy, that commonly emerges from the nature of our social interactions and structures.

Specifically, what I said to Sam was this:
“I simply observe that since time immemorial human societies have organized themselves into hierarchical systems based on more or less arbitrary tenets, of which religions are a prominent example. That’s what we’re dealing with. I think this is probably a more productive way to regard the situation than to think that humans are ritualistically inculcated into stupidity for which a dose of cold reason is the cure.”

He responded thus:
“It is amazing that you can advance this as a serious position. First off, it is undeniable that most humans are “ritualistically inculcated into stupidity” from birth onwards by their religious parents. Second, it is a perverse (and highly condescending) article of faith among secular academics that people can never be reasoned out of their religious convictions… For the purposes of this discussion, the only “social construct” that I am worried about is the one which convinces a journal like Nature that its paramount duty is to be polite in the face of Iron Age delusions.”

Religions, says Sam, are a "dangerous, deplorable, and unnecessary eruption of primeval stupidity". I guess that rules out genes, then.

So I look forward to Sam’s letter to Science pointing out that it is amazing they let Culotta present her article as a ‘serious position’. Of course, if indeed we have ‘religion in our genes’ (which is by no means clear, but which is what Silver and several of the people Culotta quotes seem to suspect), this doesn’t imply that we are predestined all to be believers, or that people can’t be persuaded to abandon religious irrationality. But it would suggest that at the level of cultures, the problem is not exactly what Sam thinks it is. He and Paul Myers seem determined to reject anything like a Darwinian view (and moreover anything like a sociological view) in favour of the notion that this universal phenomenon is just the product of blinkered ignorance. In fact I sense that they actually don’t give a fig about understanding religion – which, I have to suspect, means they are unlikely to have much effect in tempering its destructive and oppressive excesses. They seem to prefer the John Major position: that we need to understand less and condemn more. Well, it works for the Tories.

Friday, November 06, 2009

This post is strictly for ultra-nerds of Gothic architecture. I recently got this photo of the ‘transitional flying buttress’ between the nave and choir of Chartres Cathedral – something that is not at all easy to do, as the buttress is not visible from the ground but requires access to the cathedral roof. I’d gone up there for other purposes (a Nova documentary on Gothic churches), and so sadly hadn’t come properly prepared to take photos – this one is from my mobile phone, and so is not of high resolution. But I want to put it up here in case anyone else should ever want to use it without the hassle of getting permission to go up on the roof. The structure is significant because it challenges the idea that the nave is older than the choir. The arches of the nave flyers are in a more squat and massive style, with rounded arches, which could be taken as a sign that they were built first, perhaps by a different master, with the slender pointed arches of the choir flyers (more ‘Gothic’, one might say) being added by a later hand. That was the case argued by Louis Grodecki in the 1950s. But this sole ‘transitional’ flying buttress on the east of the transepts seems to be an attempt to merge the different styles of the nave and choir, as though this was part of the plan all along – perhaps, as Jan van der Meulen suggests, the crossing and transepts were built first, and both the nave and choir built out from them at much the same time. All this is discussed in my book Universe of Stone.